Are Silicon Valley Techies Becoming 'The Man'?

In the good old days, technology types were viewed as likeable geeks, the underdogs everyone could root for. But these days, techies are seen as wealthy elite. How did they become the most despised group of the Valley?

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In the old days, executives in traditional industries were berated for being out of touch with the commoner. Who can forget auto
executives flying to Washington D.C. in private jets to ask congress for a handout? Or Senator John McCain unable to tell a reporter how many
homes he and his wife own?

Now the great wealth gap has a new face of the enemy: the techie.

This week at the Crunchies Awards
in San Francisco, co-hosted by TechCrunch, Gigaom and VentureBeat, comedian John Oliver opened the event by chastising the tech-filled crowd
while protestors gathered outside. He mocked their need to hold a self-congratulatory award ceremony while they already have loads of money
stuffed in their pockets, reported SFGate.

Oliver riffed on an audience that had quickly grown quiet: "You're no longer the underdogs. It's very important that you realize that. You're not
the scrappy people that people get behind. It used to be that people who worked in the tech industry were emotional shut-ins who you could root
for. Now those days are gone. You're pissing off an entire city. Not just with what you do at work, but how you get to work. It's not easy to do
that."

Indeed, Silicon Valley has become ground zero in the nation's growing wealth disparity war, as technology-driven gentrification takes on a
polarizing, nasty turn here. From Google gag orders to hateful Facebook and Twitter posts to protesters blocking Google buses and spray-painting
nasty messages, a culture war
has begun. A wood panel in San Francisco's Mission District was tagged with the words, "F- your startup."

Ignorance and Obamacare

It doesn't help that rich tech executives continue to show their ignorance.

Earlier this month, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong told employees that he decided to cut some benefits because of increased healthcare costs due to
Obamacare and "distressed babies." Never mind that Armstrong made $12 million in 2012 and AOL had just reported strong quarterly earnings.

"We had two AOL-ers that had distressed babies that were born that we paid a million dollars each to make sure those babies were OK in
general," Armstrong said. "And those are the things that add up into our benefits cost."

"I take issue with how he reduced my daughter to a 'distressed baby' who cost the company too much money," Fei wrote. "How he blamed the
saving of her life for his decision to scale back employee benefits. How he exposed the most searing experience of our lives, one that my husband
and I still struggle to discuss with anyone but each other, for no other purpose than an absurd justification for corporate cost-cutting."

Within days of Fei's searing rebuttal, Armstrong apologized and restored the benefit cuts -- but the damage was done. Armstrong had put
"distressed babies" into the lexicon of the nation's culture war.